


Eighteen's Only Good For Other Eighteen-Year-Olds

by AndreaLyn



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-28 21:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16249907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: What's Jim to do when Bones hates Starfleet and acts like he wants to screw everything that moves? Avoid him, of course.





	Eighteen's Only Good For Other Eighteen-Year-Olds

“Does he…?”  
  
“What’s going…”  
  
“I calculate a…”  
  
The voices swarmed and swirled together in the obscure black surrounding him. His head was throbbing and the pain was getting to the point that it was distracting him, but all he could think about was getting up so that his resident wouldn’t take marks off. Shit, what had he done? He’d just been trying to sneak a patient into another procedure though the insurance didn’t cover it. Had he been caught? Had something happened?  
  
And why did his head hurt like that?  
  
“Bones.”  
  
The single word was echoing in his brain again and again and idly, McCoy slowly pushed his hands over his frame to check for breaks, wondering if this was his subconscious’ way of telling him that he’d cracked a rib or broken a foot or something. But the pain was localized to only his head and while he might only be a doctor-in-training (and a young one, at that), he knew that he would have felt something, unless the shock had yet to wear off.  
  
Slowly, he pried his eyes open and turned blurry eyes on a brilliantly-blue-eyed man staring down at him.  
  
“Bones,” he was saying, mouth moving and getting out those words. “Bones, look at me,” the man kept coaxing, but Len wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. He slowly sat up and rubbed the back of his head, letting out a groan born of pure complaint, flashing a sheepish grin up at the guy. “Bones?”  
  
“Buddy, I don’t have a single broken bone on me,” Len drawled, trying to rub the pain out of that good ol’ goosebump he was getting on his head. “But I’ve got a hell of a headache. You got something?”  
  
Suddenly, there was a flask being held out to him and Len glanced at it with trepidation.  
  
“I was talking more along the lines of a painkiller,” he said slowly, fighting to get the drawl in his voice straightened out. His words were sticking together, as if the pain was shoving them so close that they were bunkmates.   
  
Well, and he could do with a good heap of information as to why everyone was staring at him like he’d gone crazy. He shot back a helpful matching look and tried to infuse it with as much as he could of his father’s patented ‘you’re all idiots and jackasses’ look, but he felt like it fell short with him.  
  
“Jim, stop it,” a blonde woman lightly spoke, resting her hand on his arm. It was now that Len took in the Starfleet uniforms for the first time. It was also then that he realized he was clad in the blue-issue uniform himself and didn’t know what to make of that, exactly. “Can you tell me your name?”  
  
“Len McCoy,” he mumbled, still rubbing at his head until lanky pieces of dark hair fell into his eyes.   
  
“And the year?”  
  
“2246,” he parroted right back, sighing with relief when someone came by and pressed a hypospray into his neck that definitely contained a strong painkiller. It was already starting to help the ebb and flow of his headache, but something he said must have been wrong because the blonde-nurse and the gold-tuniced-man (Jim?) were exchanging looks of concern.  
  
“And how old are you?” the woman pressed on.  
  
“Eighteen,” Len replied easily with a sunny and broad grin. “What next, the finger test?”  
  
“…I need to go,” said the man in gold and suddenly he was bursting away from the room and leaving Len to wonder just what had happened that he’d find himself in Starfleet territory. This had to be a prank. This was one of his friends’ cute little idea of a joke. Knock him out and shove him on some ship to get him in trouble.   
  
Len sighed and laid himself back on the bed, turning to look at the woman with the widest, most charming grin he had. “And what’s your name?” he asked, giving her a long, appreciative look.  
  
Except instead of her replying, the world started to grow hazy and Len began to wonder just what had been put into that hypospray.  
  
 _Damn Starfleet bastards…_  
  
*  
  
“Captain,” Uhura’s voice was calling him from down the hall. “Captain, wait.” Jim was on a mission to keep moving until he ran out of space to walk and seeing as he could conceivably just keep going around and around in circles, he had no issue with that. It had been three days since that fight in med-bay with the crazed-ensign and three days since Bones had been shoved and his head had smacked the wall with a sickening ‘thud’. Three days since he’d woken up, since Jim had been yanked out of sick-bay every time someone needed him to sign off on a report or start a transmission with a passing vessel or…or, well, or the dozen other things a Captain needed to be doing.  
  
He’d managed very few conversations with  _Len_. Len, Jim thought snidely. This eighteen year old mind in the body of his best friend, some kid who smiled all the time and had no issues and was just perfectly peachily-keen on hating Starfleet with all his guts.  
  
Maybe five years ago, Jim would have bonded. Now he couldn’t help but find himself hurt.  
  
He’d just been in sick-bay and had stayed only long enough for Bones to tell him gravely that if this was the life that he had carved out for himself, he wanted to get back to Earth as soon as possible because Starfleet wasn’t what he wanted and none of this was what he wanted.   
  
Jim had read between the easy-to-see lines easily enough.  
  
 _Jim Kirk wasn’t what Bones wanted_.  
  
“Captain,” Uhura was still calling after him. He hadn’t stopped so much as he’d kept walking, but Uhura definitely had a will to catch up to him and darted in front of him, making as if she was going to try Spock’s nerve-pinch on him just to see if it would work. “Can I offer a suggestion?”  
  
“Why not, everyone else seems happy to,” Jim muttered, trying to ignore everyone else’s advice in the moments between his Captaining duties.  
  
“Tell him the truth,” she said bluntly. “You’ve told him about being CMO and the ship and the  _Narada_ , but tell him the  _truth_.”  
  
“What, the ex and the kid and his dad? No way. You’ve seen him, he looks  _happy_  and Chapel says once the swelling goes down, he’ll be himself again and he’ll remember everything and that means no more big huge ten-dollar smiles and laughter and…” He crossed his arms across his torso, hating the way that McCoy got him feeling  _insecure_ , of all the feelings in the world. “I’m not going to be the one that makes him miserable.”  
  
“You could tell him about you,” she pointed out. “I’m pretty sure those smiles will still be there in that case.” She hesitated. “Maybe. You are a pain in the ass. … _Captain_.”  
  
She saluted him before taking her leave and Jim wondered about the bridge-crew one more time and whether he should be reprimanding them for the level of casual behavior they’ve got around them.  
  
 _Nah_ , he decided.  _Wouldn’t be half as fun._    
  
And without even realizing he’d done it, he had already turned his body around and was making his way back to sick-bay to have another little conversation with Bones. He even decided that he could deal with the heavier drawl and the sparkle in the man’s eyes, he could deal with him not wanting to be a part of Starfleet because well… _tough_. His life wasn’t the same as it’d been thirteen years ago and Bones was dealing with that in his own way. Sure, not as many smiles, but in the still of the night when they were stealing moments away and pressed together in Jim’s bed, just talking idly about the next day’s tasks, well…it was something else.  
  
He had wandered in on lunch-time, apparently, as Bones was picking through his tray and swearing under his breath. “Can’t get a decent meal around this place,” he said when he caught Jim’s eye. “Just another reason to hate Starfleet.”  
  
“Yeah, okay, fine, I get it, you hate this place, blah blah blah,” Jim droned on. “Get over it. I’m not a stuffy Admiral or Captain and you’re my CMO and you kind of happen to  _love_  your job, even if you bitch about how we’re all going to die in some big fiery wreck because of the ship.” Jim took a deep breath. “And yeah, so you don’t like space, but you joined up because you had to and now you’re here because you want to. You turned down a posting on Earth.” Before Bones can open his mouth and reply, Jim kept going, steamrolling over any potential words. “Because of me.”  
  
Bones stared at him curiously and Jim bolstered up his courage as he slid into a sit on the bed and rested his hand over McCoy’s.   
  
And then suddenly, then he paused.  
  
“…were you straight at eighteen? I don’t know if we’ve ever had that…mmpf.” The kiss that Bones levelled on him shut him up pretty well. And man, but maybe Bones ought to get hit on the head more if he had that much untempered passion and aggression in him at eighteen. They’d had their share of every kind of kiss, but this one was kind of taking the cake as far as Jim was concerned.   
  
It was so good that he didn’t even feel like pointing out that normally Bones had an issue with public displays of affection.  
  
He drew away only when Spock’s voice transmitted over the ship’s communication systems (and if that wasn’t a shock of cold water to his face, he didn’t know what was). “Would the Captain please report to the deck as we are…”  
  
The ship jolted and lurched, lights flickering off, items sliding away from him.  
  
“…under attack.”  
  
Jim eased back and flashed Bones a long look of regret. “We’ll finish this conversation later,” he swore, jumping off the bed to start a sprint for the bridge and to exact some good old-fashioned revenge on whomever it was that was interrupting his time.  
  
*  
  
The attack was long, annoying, and when all three Klingon warbirds had been destroyed, Jim had a couple of cuts on his body, scrapes on his face, and was scowling as he stalked back to med-bay. The scowl only grew worse when Bones’ bed was empty and the man was nowhere to be found.  
  
“Nurse Chapel!” Jim called out stringently. “Where the hell is the patient?”  
  
“Get a mirror, then you’ll see him,” Bones’ gruff voice sounded from right behind him, hands clamping down on his arms and all-but-corralling him onto the nearest bed. “Things were starting to fade back, so I got them to prep a couple of hyposprays to accelerate the de-swelling process. Hope you didn’t miss me too much, Jim.” And suddenly he was on a bed and staring up at Bones and Bones definitely wasn’t smiling anymore.  
  
Jim almost felt guilty for it.  
  
He let Bones truss him up and deal with him and didn’t even point out that up until a few hours ago, Bones had been a patient in his very own sick-bay. He even let himself get jabbed with three hyposprays before he dared to say a word about the elephant in the room.  
  
“So you hate Starfleet, huh?”  
  
“Don’t start, Jim,” Bones said warningly. “I was eighteen.”  
  
“You hated Starfleet.”  
  
“I was a  _kid_ , screwing anything I could, and under the mistaken belief that medicine on Earth was the only thing that mattered. And terrified, incidentally, of flying,” he pointed out.  
  
“And your white-knuckle grip of death whenever we go back to Earth is…what, sheer delight now?”  
  
Yeah, okay, he earned that next hypospray. But he also felt like he earned the quiet murmur from Bones as he fell back to the bed and slowly gave in to the sedative. It wasn’t even much, it was just one little turn of phrase, but it was enough to placate Jim and make him remember that eighteen-year-olds could be notorious for being ridiculously short-sighted. He closed his eyes and gave in to the sedative, letting his mind go back over the words again and again:  
  
 _I wouldn’t trade you or this life for anything in the world._  
  
Yeah. Jim could definitely live with that.


End file.
